Category Archives: Analysis

ISIS could soon control close to half of the Syrian border with Turkey

Michael Werz and Max Hoffman write: President Barack Obama and senior administration officials have repeatedly pointed out the absence of reliable partners on the ground in Syria—the Syrian Kurdish groups, such as YPG, have the potential to help fill that gap. While the PYD (the mainly-Kurdish Democratic Union Party), which dominates the Syrian Kurdish scene, is far from perfect, it has treated the civilians under its control relatively well, has fought ISIS effectively for over a year, and entirely eschews the violent Salafi ideology that animates so many of the rebel groups in Syria. As we argued in a Center for American Progress report in July, Kurdish political and military actors will be a key part of any solution to the Syrian tragedy. While coalition aircraft hit several ISIS tanks and fighting positions Sunday, the tactical strikes must be rapidly expanded to prevent the fall of the city.

The ramifications of inadequate action are dire. First, if ISIS takes the city, they are likely to behave as they have in the past — raping, torturing and murdering residents who survive the shelling of the town. Those who are able will most likely flee to Turkey, adding to the refugee problem there and expanding the humanitarian disaster. Already, the fighting has caused UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, to say “it’s a dramatic humanitarian tragedy as we have all witnessed… the largest single outflow of Syrians in a few days, 160,000 people.”

Second, if ISIS takes Kobani, they will control close to half of the Syrian border with Turkey. This will make it even harder to stem the flow of fighters and equipment to the jihadist group. It will also make it more difficult to crack down on the illicit oil sales that finance their operations and to insulate Turkey against further infiltration and potential attacks.

Third, the fall of Kobani would enrage many Turkish Kurds and potentially derail the fragile peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Thus far, Turkey has done nothing to prevent a slaughter by ISIS just across the border. To its credit, Turkey has, for the most part, accepted Syrian refugees, despite already hosting over a million people fleeing the conflict. But the Turkish government has also hampered the provision of aid to Kobani and tear-gassed Kurdish protesters angered by the government’s refusal to help. Clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish protesters continued Sunday and Monday along the border near Kobani. PKK leaders are already angry about the slow pace of peace negotiations with the government, and a massacre in Kobani would solidify the impression among some Turkish Kurds that their government is inveterately hostile towards their group.

Fourth, Kobani has long been a thorn in ISIS’ side — one of the last redoubts of resistance north of the de facto capital of Raqqah — which is why ISIS has focused on the city with such ferocity, despite being pressed on other fronts. If the city falls, ISIS will be able to consolidate its lines and mass forces elsewhere. It will also be a propaganda victory for ISIS; the YPG has been one of the few forces able to effectively resist ISIS thus far, and a decisive defeat of the Kurdish fighters would further underline ISIS’ military edge.

Finally, the fall of Kobani would likely cripple the YPG as a fighting force. The Syrian Kurds have the potential to contribute on the ground in the coalition against ISIS; allowing them to be defeated would permanently undermine U.S. and Western efforts to reach out to Kurdish political and military actors, who will have lost all trust in the West following such a disaster. [Continue reading…]

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Most of ISIS’s ammunition was made in the U.S. and China

The New York Times reports: In its campaign across northern Syria and Iraq, the jihadist group Islamic State has been using ammunition from the United States and other countries that have been supporting the regional security forces fighting the group, according to new field data gathered by a private arms-tracking organization.

The data, part of a larger sample of captured arms and cartridges in Syria and Iraq, carries an implicit warning for policy makers and advocates of intervention.

It suggests that ammunition transferred into Syria and Iraq to help stabilize governments has instead passed from the governments to the jihadists, helping to fuel the Islamic State’s rise and persistent combat power. Rifle cartridges from the United States, the sample shows, have played a significant role.

“The lesson learned here is that the defense and security forces that have been supplied ammunition by external nations really don’t have the capacity to maintain custody of that ammunition,” said James Bevan, director of Conflict Armament Research, the organization that is gathering and analyzing weapons used by the Islamic State.[Continue reading…]

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ISIS adapts to U.S. airstrikes, holds territory and advances in American tanks, killing Kurds


A Wall Street Journal report shows that while the Pentagon claims that it has been successful in “disrupting” ISIS, what is much more obvious is the ease with which the organization has thus far adapted to the U.S.-led air campaign.

A U.S. official is quoted saying: “We’re not trying to take ground away from them [in Syria]. We’re trying to take capability away from them.”

And as the population of Kobane has witnessed, the U.S. is not even trying hard to prevent ISIS conquering new territory.

Islamic State fighters have reacted swiftly to the threat of airstrikes over the past weeks, moving out of captured military bases and government buildings in Syria, relocating weapons and hostages, and abandoning training camps, according to residents and rebels in the areas the militants control. In Syria and Iraq, they took down many of their trademark black flags, and camouflaged armed pickup trucks. They also took cover among civilians.

They also have maintained much of their financing and recruiting capability and continued to crack down on local populations, anti-regime activists and rebels in Syria said. At the same time, they publicized a series of beheadings of Western hostages.

In addition to holding territory after they came under attack, they pressed on with an ambitious offensive on the Syrian city of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani, close to the border with Turkey.

Analysts said the U.S. is having a hard time getting intelligence to act on, and, as a result, a fraction of sorties flown have resulted in bombings.

Syrian anti-Assad activists and members of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army said the U.S. is overestimating the impact it has had on Islamic State. Some residents living in areas controlled by the group in Syria maintain that the air campaign has had little effect.

Militants began moving weaponry and leadership away from their bases immediately after the U.S. announced in September it would strike targets in Syria, activists and rebels said. By mid-September, residents of Raqqa—Islamic State’s de facto capital in northeastern Syria—said the city was emptied of the group’s senior leadership.

“We used to see commanders around the city. But since the announcement [that airstrikes would begin], they’re gone,” said one Raqqa resident.

However, an official from one U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf defended the success of the strikes so far, saying they had slowed the militants’ advance in both countries and was slowly degrading their financing infrastructure.

“ISIS will have a big problem when winter starts,” said one aid worker who provides relief in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour.

“They gained some popularity by distributing [a monthly stipend] of gas to the population and lowering prices. They won’t be able to do that.”

An Islamic State member interviewed via Skype said strikes by the Syrian regime have been more damaging than the U.S.-led assaults, and claimed the group’s production and refining of oil—a major revenue source — continues.

Christopher Harmer, a defense analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the U.S. is having a hard time getting actionable intelligence. As a result, he estimated only about 10% of the sorties being flown by the U.S. and its partners have dropped bombs.

“ISIS is not really structured in such a way as to be vulnerable to airstrikes,” he said. “They don’t have a lot of static targets. We can bomb a building here, a building there, a tank here, a truck there. But ISIS fighters are very good at intermingling with the civilian population.”

U.S. officials have said the strikes have had a high degree of accuracy.

One U.K. defense expert said that the coalition so far has struck mostly static targets, when the better way to hamper the group’s mobility is attacking fighters moving from one area to another.

“What air power can do is cut down on that mobility,” said Michael Clarke, the director at the Royal United Services Institute, an independent think tank on defense and security. “But it’s not evident at the moment that the coalition of air power has succeeded in doing that.”

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Syria-to-Ukraine wars send U.S. defense stocks to records

Bloomberg reports: Led by Lockheed Martin Corp., the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.

Investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based BMO Private Bank. President Barack Obama approved open-ended airstrikes this month while ruling out ground combat.

“As we ramp up our military muscle in the Mideast, there’s a sense that demand for military equipment and weaponry will likely rise,” said Ablin, who oversees $66 billion including Northrop Grumman Corp. and Boeing Co. shares. “To the extent we can shift away from relying on troops and rely more heavily on equipment — that could present an opportunity.”

Bombardments of Islamic State strongholds added to tensions this year that include U.S.-led sanctions on Russia for backing Ukrainian rebels and China’s feuds with neighbors over disputed South China Sea islands. The U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip. [Continue reading…]

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The seeds of failure in Syria and Ukraine were planted long ago

Kennette Benedict writes: In September the United States, along with European and Middle Eastern partners, deployed air power to destroy the radical forces that are occupying territory on the Iraqi-Syrian border. And in his September 24 speech to the UN General Assembly, US President Barack Obama harshly criticized Moscow for seizing Ukrainian territory and backing separatists, saying that “we will impose a cost on Russia for aggression.”

Though more than 1,000 miles apart, these two foreign policy challenges for the United States have much in common. For the sake of civilians — ordinary people trying to make a living, feed their children, and live with a modicum of dignity — we all hope that efforts to end violent conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine will succeed. But Washington’s approach to both problems is ad-hoc and may be much too late. Without new institutions of regional governance, economic integration, and cultural dialogue, these efforts will likely fail to bring about peace and stability.

By “too late” I mean years and even decades too late. That’s because the two major foreign policy debacles the United States faces today could have been avoided by building new institutions when the opportunity first presented itself at the end of the Cold War.

In the 1990s, though, the US foreign policy community fell into intellectual disarray. The hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union had seemed nearly immutable, and ideological positions blinded even intelligent analysts to the need for a far-reaching post-Cold War plan. Very few had been contemplating what would be needed once the USSR collapsed. There were no plans to help build former Soviet societies after years of economic stagnation and environmental neglect, as there had been for Germany and Japan after World War II. Nor were proposals for international cooperation to prevent future schisms and new “cold wars” given much thought. The national security and foreign policy establishments in the United States and Europe did not undertake any thoroughgoing reviews or take seriously any new ideas that went beyond the already-existing United Nations. [Continue reading…]

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The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonising religion

John Gray reviews Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, by Karen Armstrong: Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho­meini became supreme leader, a US official was heard to exclaim: “Who ever took religion seriously?” The official was baffled at the interruption of what he assumed was an overwhelmingly powerful historical trend. Pretty well everyone at the time took it for granted that religion was on the way out, not only as a matter of personal belief, but even more as a deciding factor in politics. Secularisation was advancing everywhere, and with increasing scientific knowledge and growing prosperity it was poised to become a universal human condition. True, there were some countries that remained stubbornly religious – including, ironically, the United States. But these were exceptions. Religion was an atavistic way of thinking which was gradually but inexorably losing its power. In universities, grandiose theories of secularisation were taught as established fact, while politicians dismissed ideas they didn’t like as “mere theology”. The unimportance of religion was part of conventional wisdom, an unthinking assumption of those who liked to see themselves as thinking people.

Today no one could ask why religion should be taken seriously. Those who used to dismiss religion are terrified by the in­tensity of its revival. Karen Armstrong, who cites the US official, describes the current state of opinion: “In the west the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident.” She goes on:

As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion . . . Experts in political violence or terrorism insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the 20th century on to the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness.

The idea that religion is fading away has been replaced in conventional wisdom by the notion that religion lies behind most of the world’s conflicts. Many among the present crop of atheists hold both ideas at the same time. They will fulminate against religion, declaring that it is responsible for much of the violence of the present time, then a moment later tell you with equally dogmatic fervour that religion is in rapid decline. Of course it’s a mistake to expect logic from rationalists. More than anything else, the evangelical atheism of recent years is a symptom of moral panic. Worldwide secularisation, which was believed to be an integral part of the process of becoming modern, shows no signs of happening. Quite the contrary: in much of the world, religion is in the ascendant. For many people the result is a condition of acute cognitive dissonance. [Continue reading…]

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Coalition risks loss of support in Syria unless it clarifies its aims

Hassan Hassan writes: As the US-led offensive against ISIL inside Syria enters its 10th day today, there already appears to be a growing public backlash in Syria against the campaign. The scepticism about the air strikes emanates from the lack of clarity over the real aims and objectives of the offensive. Five reasons can be identified for this cynicism, which should be addressed if the air strikes are to lead to a positive outcome.

The first one is that the air strikes do not offer any clear endgame. This lack of clarity over what to expect from the air strikes has led Syrians to interpret the signals they have received so far. Bashar Al Assad, for example, is not only spared the air strikes, but he also has more time to bomb civilian areas, given that the pressure against his forces in Hama and eastern Aleppo has been reduced significantly. This is creating an impression that the Assad regime is a de facto partner in the US coalition, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

Another reason is the economic consequences of the air strikes. On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced that most of the oil refineries controlled by ISIL in Syria have been destroyed. These refineries will prevent ISIL from generating further revenues in Syria, which will also affect ISIL in Iraq, as much of the refined oil is transferred to the other side of the border.

However, these refineries, even before ISIL’s arrival in eastern Syria, have served as a lifeline for local communities.

Oil refineries have helped the population in Deir Ezzor to survive starvation after they were isolated between the Iraqi authorities across theborder, on one hand, and the regime on the other. These refineries were the latchkeys of a full-fledged war economy that helped to operate water-pumping engines to irrigate lands far from the Euphrates river. Without them, the situation in Deir Ezzor would have been much worse. Destroying these refineries will not affect ISIL, which had stopped operating them days before the air strikes began, as much as it will affect families living there. [Continue reading…]

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Why Turkey’s parliamentary vote authorizing military action is unlikely to result in military action

Aron Lund writes: While Turkey is likely to lend assistance to the U.S.-led campaign, the parliamentary vote won’t trigger any military action by itself. Much of the reporting and commentary on the vote has overlooked that this is in fact the third year in a row that Turkey’s parliament has issued an authorization for military force.

The first of such resolutions was passed in October 2012, after several exchanges of fire across the Syrian-Turkish border. The one-year authorization took aim at the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, serving as a shot across the bow by lowering Turkey’s threshold for intervention.

However, no intervention ever came. The parliament therefore extended its one-year deadline in October 2013. Again, no intervention took place during the year, and the resolution is set to expire today. That’s why the Turkish parliament has issued a resolution now—not because of the fighting in Kobane or the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, although it may of course be used to join these battles. [Continue reading…]

In this useful analysis, Lund refers to the PKK as being “even now involved in violence against the [Turkish] army,” yet the evidence of this which he cites is a report on “a clash [which] erupted after a group of Turkish soldiers, deployed on a hill with four military vehicles, opened fire on a group of HPG [PKK] guerrillas.”

It looks like Lund should have written that the Turkish army is even now involved in violence against the PKK.

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Turkey and the PKK: How to deal with Syria’s Kurds

The Economist: Turkey is deeply unnerved by the emergence of yet another Kurdish entity on its frontier. Making matters worse is that, unlike Iraqi Kurdistan, which is now Turkey’s biggest regional ally and trading partner, the Syrian Kurdish region, known as Rojava in Kurdish, is dominated by Turkey’s biggest foe, the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party].

This unforeseen twist shoved Turkey’s long-festering Kurdish problem beyond its borders, propelling a panic-stricken AK to resume peace talks with [PKK leader Abdullah] Ocalan. “Rojava’s fate and the peace process in Turkey are inseparable,” argues Arzu Yilmaz, an academic. Turkey’s plan, she adds, is to keep the ceasefire running until next summer’s parliamentary elections by throwing titbits at the Kurds.

These were supposed to include the introduction of optional Kurdish-language lessons in state run schools. But the scheme has not taken off. “For the past three years my children have been trying to sign up for Kurdish classes but they either tell us that there are no teachers or not enough demand,” complains Altan Tan, an MP for the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party. The Kurds have attempted to set up informal Kurdish-language schools of their own, but these were promptly shut by the police last month. A group calling itself the PKK’s youth wing responded by torching more than 30 government schools in the Kurdish region, provoking a barrage of outrage among ordinary citizens, Kurds included.

Yet even though the PKK moans about the lack of progress in Turkey, much of their horse-trading with the AK currently revolves around Syria’s Kurds. Turkey is pressing the PYD to end its undeclared non-aggression pact with Mr Assad and to join the rebels seeking to overthrow him. At the same time they are being told to share power with rival Syrian Kurdish groups. More implausibly still, Turkey also wants the PYD to sever ties with the PKK and perhaps even to cede control over Kobane, which would become part of a planned “safe pocket” to park refugees and to train and equip the rebels. [Continue reading…]

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ICG’s Peter Harling interviewed on ISIS

Le Point: How do Sunni populations perceive this organisation: as a terrorist group or a liberator from the Shiite yoke?

Peter Harling: Both! The Sunni Arab world is in an existential crisis. So far, the region has, so to speak, failed to exit from an era of decline that began under the domination of the Ottoman Empire and continued through colonialism, multiple Western intrusions and the trauma of the creation of Israel. The great independence movements, which started as powerful sources of inspiration, quickly degenerated into autocratic kleptomaniac clans. Their Islamist alternatives, offering attractive visions of the future, were utopian and failed miserably when put into practice.

The Arab uprisings – a flashing, beautiful moment – were meant to offer redemption and a new beginning to the region but for now have turned into a nightmare. Imagine the mixed feelings of confusion, failure, bitterness, injustice and humiliation that followed. Add the unthinkable violence applied by the Syrian regime, without any serious reaction from the West; the depth and breadth of the humanitarian crisis that ensued; the upsetting rise of reactionary trends in Egypt, in the Gulf and elsewhere. Finally, add to all of this the constant provocations coming from the Shiite world, which is enough in the ascendant to be experiencing a form of hubris. In sum, very few people like Daesh, but there is nothing else.

How did the organisation manage to take possession of large parts of territory?

Daesh is filling a void. It imposed itself in the north east of Syria essentially because the Syrian regime had withdrawn from this largely barren region. It was able to take control of Mosul, in Iraq, simply because the authorities were present only through local elites sold-out to Baghdad and a sectarian, cynical and incompetent security apparatus. Daesh recently penetrated into the north of Lebanon, in a particularly neglected fringe of the country.

However, Daesh does not use its limited resources to try to expand its territory in zones where its occupation is doomed to fail, that is, zones where there can be an active resistance. That is why it has always been absurd to think that the organisation would march to Baghdad, which is well defended by Shiite militias, or take over Erbil, a fiefdom of Kurdish factions. In the same way, Daesh does not seriously attack the Syrian regime. On the contrary, it focuses on imposing its hegemony in those zones it is capable of dominating, decimating any potential Sunni Arab competitor.

Who is to blame for the rise of IS?

Everyone participated in it: the Iranians, by supporting the Syrian and Iraqi regimes, whose explicit aim was to radicalise Sunnis in order to discredit and to combat any opposition in the name of a so-called “war against terrorism”, and then by bankrolling a Shiite jihad which could only reinforce its Sunni counterpart. The West, by encouraging a Syrian revolt to which we offered solidarity and support, but which we mostly left on its own to face extreme forms and levels of violence. Turkey, which until recently had its borders wide open to anyone claiming to be going to fight Bashar al-Assad. The Gulf monarchies, which financed the Syrian opposition in an indecisive, confused and reckless way, which indirectly benefited the jihadis. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS and al Qaeda are ‘one and the same’ to Obama despite evidence of schism

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration is publicly conflating the Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida, taking a legally convenient position for its new war that dismisses a major public split between the two jihadist organizations.

While several US officials contend the rupture between Isis and al-Qaida is irrelevant – Secretary of State John Kerry has mocked it as a “publicity stunt” – the administration line undercuts its previous distinctions between al-Qaida’s core leadership, various affiliates and unrelated terrorist groups.

Amongst counter-terrorism veterans, the conflation is considered tendentious – and, to some, reminiscent of the Bush administration’s exaggerated linkages between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, part of the language that tried to sell the 2003 Iraq invasion.

While Isis began life as al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida’s leadership ultimately renounced all ties and condemned the group in February 2014. It is believed to be the first time al-Qaida has declared itself “not responsible” for a former affiliate.

“We know from open sourcing that they are not part of al-Qaida,” said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst. “Zawahiri denounced them. Baghdadi has declared his caliphate separate. We have no reason to believe they are currently operating as part of al-Qaida,” she said, referring to the respective leaders of al-Qaida and Isis.

Glenn Carle, a former CIA official who supports taking action against Isis, said that while the US public may not need a catalogue of the differences between Isis and al-Qaida, “each of them is different, and they are not one group.”

Much of the administration’s conflation of Isis and al-Qaida has occurred in a legal context, part of its argument that Obama possesses authority to attack Isis in Syria ahead of a congressional vote. But the contention is starting to migrate beyond legal discussions. [Continue reading…]

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‘We see ourselves as the vanguard’: the police force using drones to fight crime

The Guardian reports: The video begins with a suspect in a red car screeching to a halt outside an abandoned farmhouse with two police vehicles, sirens blazing, in hot pursuit. The suspect makes off on foot, waving a large handgun in front of him.

Then something unusual happens. Out of the back of a police car, officers grab a gadget about the size of a suitcase, assemble it within seconds and then launch it buzzing into the air. It hovers directly over the suspect, streaming images of the man from a high-definition camera down to a mobile computer screen. “I have a visual of the suspect,” an officer says into his radio device. “Positive ID of a gun in his right hand – proceed with caution.”

The film is an elaborate piece of theatre, replete with hard-rock soundtrack, designed to show off the law enforcement potential of the Qube, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The gadget – which has four rotor blades, is three feet long and weighs 5.5lbs – is at the forefront of the use of drone technology by police forces in the US. [Continue reading…]

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As Assad loyalists feel he can no longer protect them, Iran’s support becomes questionable

BBC News reports: In the Damascus suburb of Dummar stands a four-storey building overlooking a wide residential street that has been spared the scars of war.

In the first three years of the uprising in Syria, Aliya would peer through the window, watching explosions and smoke as neighbouring areas were bombarded by government forces stationed on nearby Mount Qassioun.

But since the summer, the view has changed dramatically.

Aliya now sees people flying through the sky on a ride at a new amusement park, leisure and shopping centre called Uptown.

President Bashar al-Assad’s feared younger brother, Maher, is believed to be the main backer of the $35m (£22m) development, which was built at a time when almost half of the country’s 22 million population has been displaced and more than half are living in poverty.

The road leading to Uptown is regularly blocked by expensive cars, while its colourful lights are unaffected by the severe power cuts that plague the rest of the area.

“Most of the crowd going there is mainly watching the rides rather than going on them because very few can afford such luxury,” Aliya says.

While some Syrians have welcomed Uptown, it has angered many others.

Not far away is the eastern Ghouta, an agricultural belt around Damascus from which rebels launch daily mortar attacks on the city centre in response to the government shellfire and air strikes.

There, members of religious minorities that have largely stayed loyal to President Assad have been more concerned about the reported approach of jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS), known locally in Arabic as Daish.

A few weeks ago, hundreds of residents of Dukhani and Dwaila in the Ghouta fled after members of the National Defence Forces (NDF), a pro-government militia, warned them of the imminent threat from a group that considers Shia Muslims heretics and has told members of other faiths that they must convert to Islam, pay special taxes or die.

The residents quickly returned after being informed by the army that they had never been at risk, but once they got home they found their possessions – including their furniture – had been stolen.

Those affected told me that they were too afraid to confront NDF personnel, who they believed were responsible for the thefts.

Pro-government militiamen have long been accused of looting homes in opposition areas they have captured and selling the stolen goods, creating what has become known as the “Sunni market” – a reference to Syria’s majority Sunni Muslims who dominate the opposition to President Assad, a member of the heterodox Shia Alawite sect. But now loyalists are also being affected.

“In areas under government control, there is no unified central command. They are ruled by a cluster of mafia-style gangs,” says one resident of Damascus, referring to the NDF.

“A few men with guns call themselves the ‘protectors of the neighbourhood’. They then set the rules and bypass the law, in a country that is already lawless.”

A new class is emerging in Syria of warlords who have grown rich with the money they have earned from kidnapping ransoms and theft. Their rise has led many to believe that President Assad cannot control his own militia anymore.

“We used to think that this was intentional to terrify people who dared oppose his rule, but the problem now is that this savagery is targeted against his own people, even amongst the Alawites,” said the Damascus resident.

Members of minority groups feel Mr Assad can no longer protect them. [Continue reading…]

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Has the ISIS crisis pushed the CIA into bed with Hezbollah?

Jeff Stein reports: A few months ago, a former top CIA operative applied for a Lebanese visa to do some work in Beirut for an oil company. While he was waiting for approval, a package arrived at his client’s office. Inside was a full dossier on his CIA career. “It included things on where I had served, well back into 1990s,” said Charles Faddis, who ran the CIA’s covert action program in Kurdistan during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other top assignments. “It had details on my travels to Israel and Lebanon—years ago.”

Faddis took it as a blunt message from Hezbollah, the Iran-backed partner in Lebanon’s coalition government that is equal parts political party, social service agency, occupying army and terrorist group. “It was their way of saying, ‘We don’t want this guy here, but we want business with you to go forward,’” Faddis told Newsweek. It also was a way of underscoring—as if any emphasis was needed—that to do business in Lebanon, you have to go through the “Party of God.” And today that business includes the U.S. drive to recruit regional partners to wage war on the Islamic State, the group more commonly known as ISIS.

Washington wants Lebanon to stop ISIS at its borders. So does Hezbollah, whose entry into the Lebanese government last February did not get it removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. [Continue reading…]

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Is a vulnerable world teetering on the edge of a new Dark Age?

By Joseph Camilleri, La Trobe University

We appear to have reached one of those extraordinary moments in history when people everywhere, communities and even entire nations, feel increasingly stressed and vulnerable. The same may be said of the planet as a whole.

Whether intellectually or intuitively, many are asking the same question: Where are we heading? How do we explain the long list of financial, environmental and humanitarian emergencies, epidemics, small and larger conflicts, genocides, war crimes, terrorist attacks and military interventions? Why does the international community seem powerless to prevent any of this?

There is no simple or single answer to this conundrum, but two factors can shed much light.

The first involves a global power shift and the prospect of a new Cold War. The second relates to globalisation and the crises generated by the sheer scale of cross-border flows.

Is a new Cold War in the making?

The geopolitical shift has resulted in a dangerous souring of America’s relations with Russia and China.

The dispute over Ukraine is the latest chapter in the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Washington and Moscow. In what is essentially a civil war in which over 3,000 people have been killed, the two great powers have chosen to support opposing sides in the conflict by all means short of outright intervention.

The incorporation of Crimea into Russia, Moscow’s decision to use force in Georgia in 2008 and its support for the independence of the two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are part of the same dynamic.

The conduct of Russian governments in the Putin era has been at times coercive and often clumsy at home and abroad. But the United States has also much to answer for. For the last 25 years its foreign policy has been unashamedly triumphalist.

In his 1992 State of the Union address, President George Bush senior declared:

By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.

Since then we have seen the bombing of Serbia without UN Security Council approval, US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the US invasion of Iraq in defiance of UN opposition, overt support for the colour revolutions on Russia’s doorstep (Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan), and the Magnitsky Act singling out Russia for human rights violations. Western military intervention in Libya, which contrary to assurances brought about regime change, dealt a further blow to the relationship.

And now the Ukraine crisis has led to steadily expanding US and European sanctions against Russia and renewed efforts to ramp up NATO deployments and joint exercises in Eastern Europe.

Are we seeing the emergence of a new Cold War? Though ideology is now less conspicuous, the underlying structure of the conflict is remarkably similar. The trans-Atlantic alliance is once again seeking to contain and erode Russian power and influence, this time round by reaching ever closer to Russian borders.

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Feeling good about feeling bad

Nathan Thrall reviews My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit: Ari Shavit is a Haaretz columnist admired by liberal Zionists in America, where his book has been the focus of much attention. In April 1897 his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich sailed for Jaffa, leading a delegation of 21 Zionists who were investigating whether Palestine would make a suitable site for a Jewish national home. Theodor Herzl, whose pamphlet The Jewish State had been published the year before, had never been to Palestine and hoped Bentwich’s group would produce a comprehensive report of its visit for the First Zionist Congress which was to be held in Basel in August that year. Bentwich was well-to-do, Western European and religious. Herzl and most early Zionists were chiefly interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of secular and emancipated Jews in Western Europe who were becoming assimilated. A solution to the problems of both groups, he believed, could be found by resurrecting the Land of Israel in Palestine.

At the end of the 18th century, roughly 250,000 people lived in Palestine, including 6500 Jews, nearly all of them Sephardic. By 1897, when Bentwich’s delegation made its visit, the Jewish share of the population had more than tripled, with Ashkenazi Zionist immigration pushing it up towards 8 per cent. Bentwich, Shavit writes, seems not to have noticed the large majority of Gentiles – the Arab stevedores who carried him ashore, the Arab pedlars in the Jaffa market, the Arab guides and servants in his convoy. Looking out from the top of a water tower in central Palestine, he didn’t see the thousands of Muslims and Christians below, or the more than half a million Arabs living in Palestine’s twenty towns and cities and hundreds of villages. He didn’t see them, Shavit tells us, because most lived in hamlets surrounded by vacant territory; because he saw the Land of Israel as stretching far beyond the settlements of Palestine into the deserts of present-day Jordan; and because there wasn’t yet a concept of Palestinian national identity and therefore there were no Palestinians.

Bentwich’s blindness was tragic, Shavit laments, but it was necessary to save the Jews. In April 1903, 49 Jews were murdered in a pogrom in Kishinev, the capital of Moldova. More than a million Jews fled Eastern Europe over the next decade, the majority of them to America. Most of the 35,000 who immigrated to Palestine were secular and idealistic. They believed Palestine could accommodate Arabs and Jews. They lived in communual agrarian settlements, and transformed the pale, effete Jew of the ghetto into the tanned, masculine pioneer of the socialist kibbutz. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s ‘medieval’ ideology owes a lot to revolutionary France

By Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University

Over recent weeks there has been a constant background noise that Islamic State and its ideology are some sort of throwback to a distant past. It is often framed in language used last week by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who claimed that ISIS is “medieval”. In fact, the terrorist group’s thinking is very much in a more modern western tradition.

Clegg’s intervention is not surprising. Given the extreme violence of Islamic State fighters and the frequent images of decapitated bodies, it is understandable that we attempt to make sense of this violence as somehow radically “other”.

But this does not necessarily help us understand what is at stake. Above all, this tends to accept one of the core assertions of contemporary jihadism, namely its claim that it reaches back to the origins of Islam. As one Islamic State supporter I follow on Twitter is fond of saying: “the world changes, Islam doesn’t”.

Generation gap

This is not just a question for academic debate. It has real impact. One of the attractions of jihadist ideology to many young people is that it shifts generational power in their communities. Jihadists and, more broadly, Islamists present themselves as true to their religion, while their parents, so they argue, are mired in tradition or “culture”.

It needs to be said very clearly: contemporary jihadism is not a return to the past. It is a modern, anti-traditional ideology, with a very significant debt to western political history and culture.

When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque, declaring the creation of an Islamic State with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Indian/Pakistani thinker, Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and originator of the contemporary term “Islamic State”.

Maududi’s Islamic State is profoundly shaped by western ideas and concepts. He takes a belief shared between Islam and other religious traditions, namely that God alone is the ultimate judge of a person, and transforms this – reframing God’s possession of judgement into possession of, and ultimately monopoly of, “sovereignty”. Maududi also draws upon understandings of the natural world governed by laws that are expressions of the power of God – ideas at the heart of the 17th-century scientific revolution. He combines these in a vision of the sovereignty of God, then goes on to define this sovereignty in political terms, affirming that “God alone is the sovereign” (The Islamic Way of Life). The State and the divine thus fuse together, so that as God becomes political and politics becomes sacred.

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